Reflections on Judge Weinstein's Ethical Dilemmas in Mass Tort Litigation

Abstract

Jack Weinstein was one of my teachers at Columbia Law School. As a young professor he was already a master of his subject and was to become master teacher. About the time I graduated-in the same year that the Supreme Court published the legal watershed Brown v. Board of Education -Jack became Chief Reporter for a New York State commission charged with comprehensively revising the rules of New York civil procedure. He performed the task superbly, given the constraints of the almost suffocatingly conservative New York bench, bar, and legislature. He was to become the authoritative expositor of the New York Civil Practice Act and Rules, always seeking to reconcile arcane technicalities with the larger purposes and values of procedural justice.